Philosophical Perspectives on Trustworthiness and Open-mindedness as Professional Virtues for the Practice of Nursing: Implications for he Moral Education of Nurses

takes place. Thus while many nurses will take it as read that they are caring for patients
in a predominately medical environment, many others will consider that medicine has
little to do with the nursing care required by, for example, someone whose reason for
being in receipt of nursing care is either поп-medical (for example, someone with
learning disabilities) or incurable (in any medical sense). The role of a nurse in caring
for persons so described might include providing assistance in living outside of an
institution or help in maximising potential for self-determination. It should be evident
from this brief discussion that there is no simple definition of either what it means to be
a nurse or of what is taken to be meant by the term nursing and more detailed
consideration is given to this in Chapter 3. For now it is sufficient to recognise the
complexity of nursing and to suggest that one thing that nurses have in common is a
concern for the well-being of persons in receipt of nursing care.

Structure and content of the thesis

Chapter 1 introduces the idea that, contrary to expectation, the teaching of ethics to
students of nursing cannot, of itself, lead to the development of an ethical practitioner.
The reasons for this are explored and it is argued that this failure of ethics to develop the
appropriate virtues requires an explicit moral education for nurses. An outline of, and
some preliminary justification for, the general Aristotelian approach adopted is offered
together with a response to a particularly strong challenge to the whole idea of a virtue
ethics.

Chapter 2 proceeds with a discussion of human vulnerability in general and in relation
to the position of those who are or who become the recipients of nursing practice in
particular. I argue that patients are more-than-ordinarily vulnerable and that being
more-than-ordinarily vulnerable compromises the possibilities of human flourishing in
ways that being ordinarily vulnerable does not. From this I argue that one legitimate end
of nursing is the encouraging of human flourishing; in other words that nursing can be
understood, at least in part, as a response to particular aspects of human vulnerability.
And because of this it is necessary for nurses to cultivate and exhibit certain sorts of
professional virtues.

Chapter 3 begins with an argument against the idea that nursing is a science and
against the idea that the development of some kind of a pure nursing science is either
possible or desirable. I argue that nursing is better served by being understood as a

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